NATO Solidarity (not...)
 

New York Times: Survey Points to Challenges NATO Faces Over Russia

WASHINGTON — As NATO faces a resurgent Russian military, a substantial number of Europeans do not believe that their own countries should rush to defend an ally against attack, according to a comprehensive survey to be made public on Wednesday. NATO’s charter states that an attack against one member should be considered an attack against all, but the survey points to the challenges the alliance faces in trying to maintain its cohesion in the face of an increasingly aggressive Russia.

“At least half of Germans, French and Italians say their country should not use military force to defend a NATO ally if attacked by Russia,” the Pew Research Center said it found in its survey, which is based on interviews in 10 nations.......

The survey is likely to send an unsettling message to Baltic members of the alliance, which have been looking for more assurances from NATO that it will protect them from Russian meddling. Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia have been worried that they may become targets of some of the “hybrid war” tactics that Russia has used to try to mask its operations in eastern Ukraine. They include the use of specially trained troops without identifying patches whose operations are denied by Moscow.

“Our data shows that Germans, French and Italians have little inclination to come to a NATO ally’s defense,” said Bruce Stokes, the director for global economic attitudes at the Pew Research Center, “and if the next military conflict in the region is hybrid warfare, and there is some debate who these Russian-speaking fighters are, such attitudes will only further inhibit NATO’s response.” The Pew report is based on 11,116 telephone and face-to-face interviews in eight NATO countries as well as Russia and Ukraine. The interviews were conducted from early April to mid-May, and the results have a margin of error of roughly plus or minus three to four percentage points, the center said.

The Western alliance has long found it difficult to mobilize public support for military spending. But public opinion is not always decisive in shaping NATO policy. President Ronald Reagan managed to win sufficient European backing to deploy Pershing II and ground-launched cruise missiles on the Continent despite a substantial peace movement. Those missile deployments increased pressure on the Kremlin to negotiate a 1987 American-Russian treaty banning intermediate-range land-based missiles.

Not all of the data in the Pew report is bad news for NATO. According to the study, residents of most NATO countries still believe that the United States would come to their defense. Americans and Canadians also largely say that their countries should act militarily to defend a NATO ally, and nearly half of the British, Polish and Spanish respondents say the same. “You would have a basis for building a political consensus if there was a serious Russian attack,” Mr. Daalder said.

But the study highlights sharp differences within the alliance’s ranks. Of all those surveyed, Poles were most alarmed by Moscow’s muscle flexing, with 70 percent saying that Russia was a major military threat.

Germany, a critical American ally in the effort to forge a Ukraine peace settlement, was at the other end of the spectrum. Only 38 percent of Germans said that Russia was a danger to neighboring countries aside from Ukraine, and only 29 percent blamed Russia for the violence in Ukraine. Consequently, 58 percent of Germans do not believe that their country should use force to defend another NATO ally. Just 19 percent of Germans say NATO weapons should be sent to the Ukrainian government to help it better contend with Russian and separatist attacks. Support for the NATO alliance in Germany was tallied at 55 percent, down from 73 percent in 2009. Those results are influenced by Germans in the eastern part of the country, who are more than twice as likely as western Germans to have confidence in President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

In the United States, the study notes, support for NATO remains fairly strong. Americans and Canadians, it says, were the only nationalities surveyed in which more than half of those polled believed that their country should take military action if Russia attacked a NATO ally. Forty-six percent of Americans believe that the United States should provide arms to the Ukrainian government, though Republicans are more likely than Democrats to support such a move.

The findings on Russians’ attitudes are likely to be disappointing for NATO supporters. Western officials have calculated that economic sanctions will eventually erode Russian support for Mr. Putin’s decision to intervene in eastern Ukraine, but he has remained extremely popular by riding a wave of nationalism and controlling much of the news media. Most Russians are unhappy with the state of the economy, but they tend to blame not Mr. Putin but the drop in oil prices and the West’s efforts to punish Russia.

Eighty-eight percent of Russians said they had confidence in Mr. Putin to do the right thing on international affairs, the highest rating since Pew started taking polls on the question in 2003. “The Ukrainian situation continues to be very good for Vladimir Putin with his own people,” Mr. Stokes said. “The Russians feel the pain of the economy, but they blame it on the West, not on Putin.”

Wow, how sadly typical. No, I don't want to help defend my neighbors, but yes of course, the folks across the ocean will come rescue me.

It's unfortunately symptomatic of how Western society has forgotten that all is unlikely to be sweetness and light and fluffy bunnies indefinitely. At some stage, real hard decisions with equally real hard consequences and/or risk need to be made.

Couple that with a half-decent maskirovka, some partly justified scepticism about our various Asian adventures of late and all of a sudden, getting any sort of decisive majority to do anything about anything (Greece, Russia, Mediterranean refugees, ISIL, Nuclear Iran, China & SC sea) becomes very hard.....

What was that phrase about a vacuum?

Given the economic ties between Germany and Russia and given that half used to be aligned with the USSR [like it or not the anti US indoctrination still runs deep in many] it's no great surprise that they said that.

:mad:'s. lol.

What a shame for those French, Germans and Italians who do not want to use military force that their governments are tied into a treaty that would lead to it then. I guess that the Germans they asked were either under 25 or from the western half of the country, and have no concept of late 20th century history?

If I look at Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam and several other places I´m not sure if it is desirable to be "rescued" by the US....

I always thought the world would welcome peace loving, not war mongering Germans, after all we have been the evil ones for many decades...

I guess we just can`t do it right for the other people....

"Wow, how sadly typical. No, I don't want to help defend my neighbors, but yes of course, the folks across the ocean will come rescue me."

I don't think it is that simple. The economies of Europe have been forced into austerity by the IMF using the Washington Consensus of how to form structural adjustment which also includes expenditure reduction, devaluation of currency, privatisation, and a liberalisation of foreign investment; which will make the electorate feel that the country is short of money, and being given away to the highest foreign bidder.

I interpret that comment as more of "We need to get our own houses in order before we help others" already NATO is concerned at the austerity imposed by major EU economies of breaking the 2% of GDP defence spend.

The fact that the US spend so much more of their GDP on defence and already has deployments in almost every NATO member state, leads to a reasonable conclusion that the US probably won't stand by and let opposing forces invade a NATO country where it is already present.

I don't think the governments are ready to delete Article 5 from the Treaty just yet. KenV, you can relax, but nice to hear what you think is 'sadly typical' of your European allies. Surveys such as this are notorious for being susceptible to a number of factors: who asks the question, the people asked, the items currently in the press (and the way they're reported) and the way questions are presented.

Ask questions in the street in Western Europe and one might have a good chance of finding a lot of people with little interest in NATO, with a feeling that there there are no real military threats to their homelands and an opinion that there have been a couple of long wars recently that they really didn't want to be a part of. It wouldn't be difficult to dream up a handful of questions that would elicit the kind of responses that the 'report' suggests.

To look at a couple of the bigger players here. France is up to its elbows in its former colonies in Africa. Not widely reported outside of France - certainly not in the States (but not much is if it didn't happen there). France has also been a major player in a lot of recent ops and the people here would rather see M Hollande spending his time and their money sorting out the economy. The Germans have a natural leaning towards expressing themselves as a forward-looking, liberal, peaceful nation for obvious reasons. Most are pro-NATO as a defensive organisation, but they too have seen too much use of military power on their televisions in recent years to feel comfortable with. Certainly outward expressions of support for such things do not sit comfortably with many.

Then there's the UK. I would hazard a guess that there are large numbers of labour-voting, knife-toting, gangsta-speaking ladies and gentlemen there that don't even know what NATO is, init? Of the ones that can read (or at least watch a television set), again too many recent moving images of coffins coming home from somewhere way East of home.

And on.

Now, change one thing and those opinions could change very quickly. Russia attacks (or becomes involved with insurrection or whatever) in a Western European country and suddly the fickle public recognise a real threat to their piece of suburbia. That's how people that get 'interviewed' for surveys such as this are influenced.

After all that, a couple of deep thoughts for you all:

All is fine in NATO,
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DUzRJfAc-HU
(5 minutes 45 seconds)

Ask the right questions in your surveys,
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA
(2 minutes 17 seconds)

The assertion that UK would come to the aid of a NATO member state under threat is almost laughable . . . what with? :ugh:

YES we have a deterrent (for the time being), but the whole point of that is NOT to use it.

'Call me Dave' is determined to carry on stripping out any military capability we retain in order to further his political career (and After-Dinner Speeches circuit).

Courtney mill..

Your second last post was top..spot on

Thank you. The first one was clearly a load of old dingo's kidneys :ok:

It is worth adding that the expansion of NATO to include Poland and the Baltic states took place with no democratic input from the populations of the existing members. Bearing in mind the commitment of mutual defence that being a member of NATO brings, and bearing in mind the difficulties that we have keeping people happy on the 'economic union' that we are part of. It is no surprise that a lot of people are uncertain whether they support a 'defence union' that has moved right up to the borders of Russia.

Thanks. Plus the fact that many of my countrymen lived under the decades long thread of being THE nuke battlefield AFTER been bombed to Kingdom come in 39-45 made at least some of us think twice before making the "Texan" approach (shoot first, ask questions then) our preferred mode of foreign affairs.... recent criticism of NATO in Germany was well deserved (IMHO) after the partly stupid eruption of aggressive horse manure out of the NATO HQ during the early phases of the current problem in the Ukraine.

When was the vote on the establishment and expansion in the 1940-70s? Or are you just being picky?

While Article 5 is quite clear, defining an event as an invocation for Article 5 is something else.

Plausible deniability and plausible refusal to acknowledge Article 5 by the NAC DPC could mean "you're on your own"

And that, Pontious, is what Article 4 is for. Article 4 has been used, what, 3 or 4 years ago by Turkey? Article 5 was used by the USA after 9/11. And, guess what. NATO members, including the UK, stepped up.

Oh, and remember that when Article 5 is invoked, it has to be reported the UN and would, under normal circumstances, be revoked once the UN takes action (such as that may be!). But that last bit means that Allied nations do not have to feel they are signing up to war just by responding to an Article 5 request.

Article 5 is generally invoked by request, Pontious. No deniability there.

Still scared, KenV?

CM, quite.

ORAC, I'm partly being picky and partly illustrating the fact that 'the people' don't seem to be quite as compliant now as they were when NATO was created! (and of course, the threat when NATO was created was perhaps more singular and apparent that it is now).

Handy,

Not as compliant? See my post #8 for what they signed up to and #17 for recent examples of it working since the threat became less apparent and singular.